The problem with writing a novel is that when you mention what you’re doing, people always want to know what it’s about. I ran into this not long ago when I was working on the first couple chapters of a sci-fi novel. I distinctly remember my first attempt to describe it to someone: “It sounds lame whenever I try to explain it.”
This is probably not the best way to get people interested in your book. My problem was that I had several characters I liked, a concept I loved, a setting that was just beginning to take shape, and I had no clue how to compact all that into less than thirty seconds. Nothing I could come up with seemed to capture it. A story is always far richer in your head than you can explain in a soundbyte, so how to compress it into a marketing slogan? How to explain to people why this idea interests you so much that you want to write a whole book about it, without explaining the entire plot in detail?
After a minute of thinking I was able to get it to: “It’s about a world where hyperspace travel is possible, as long as there are gates at each endpoint. My story is about the people who travel at sublight speeds for years to build the gates, and the kind of lives they lead.” It still doesn’t sound great, in my opinion, but it’s way better than my first try. (That particular novel’s not dead yet, by the way– the characters are still very much alive in my head, but since I’ve already written a few chapters for it, I decided not to use it for NaNoWriMo. After all, for that you’re supposed to start from Page 1.)
My story for NaNoWriMo is an epic fantasy, and here it’s even harder to boil it down to a 30-second pitch. With the invention of a larger-than-usual cast of characters, an entirely new fantasy setting, magic systems, back story… how do you boil it down?
Consider the novel “A Game of Thrones” by George R. R. Martin– what’s the thirty second pitch for that novel? I have no idea. Granted, some epic fantasies do have good pitches… “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson is basically: what if the hero of prophecy failed and the Dark Lord triumphed? Granted, there’s a heck of lot more to the book than that, but that’s a nice snappy pitch.
Maybe a good pitch for mine will occur to me while I’m writing. If it does, I’ll post it.
Off the Written Path 